Zhunan

December 28, 2018

Before getting to today’s ride, I want to put up this photo from two days back that inadvertently left out before. I could do the research to identify it myself of course, but someone else might recognize it already.

We awoke to partially blue skies today, which became bluer as the day went on. It looks like a great day to ride. Looks are a bit deceiving though. I should have posted a video so you could see the clouds racing across the sky. There’s a 30 mph wind blowing from the northeast that won’t ease up all day. It’s fortunately generally in our favor, but all day long we’ll find ourselves wrestling with it for control of our bikes - bad enough on the open road, but more worrisome on a narrow bridge or in traffic.

Our destination today, Zhunan, is a small town near the coast just about fifteen miles south of us. It’s not an obvious destination, but we’re using it as a stopover to help break up the long ride to Taichung. It doesn’t break it up very effectively, because we still have another 54 miles the next day. It’s the only place we could find with reasonable lodging though, so we’re taking what we can get.

Fifteen flat downwind miles along the coast doesn’t make much sense though, so we have the bright idea of lengthening it by biking into the foothills to the southeast. The ride I pick out doesn’t look too bad - no significant climbs, and our high point barely reaches five hundred feet. Look again at that elevation profile though, and you’ll see that it looks a bit like a rip saw.

The saw did it’s work well. By the end of the day, we both definitely feel ripped up by the time we finally reach our hotel. One damn 10-12% climb after another. Between that and wrestling with the wind, today’s was the hardest ride we’ve had in probably two months.

And, tired as I am, I’m going to stop here and take a nap. I may come back and have more to say later. Or not. In case I don’t make it back here though, I should at least throw out a few reminders of highlights - getting lost or dead ended a few times in the large industrial parks in east Hsinchu; taking the wrong turn and dropping down a supersteep lane for a few hundred yards, only to come to a dead end and have to turn around and push our way back out; a long walk after dark to an Italian restaurant that is mismarked by about a quarter mile on Google, which we eventually found by inquiries; the near incessant squeal of my bike, which is rubbing somewhere that I’m completely unable to locate - it’s slowly driving me nuts; and the dogs - we must have seen hundreds of dogs today, mostly small, running loose, and bored; and our excitement at finding a real, well stocked Carrafour market that even carries peanut butter, bagels, and muesli!